Contact:
Jenifer Shockley, 404-413-7078
J. Mack Robinson College of Business
ATLANTA –Todd Maurer, professor of managerial sciences at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business and director of the W. T. Beebe Institute of Personnel and Employment Relations, has received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Institute to study leadership development tools.
Maurer is a psychologist by training, and the focus of the project is on issues in organizational behavior and human resource management. These include employee and leadership development, performance appraisal and feedback, aging workers and job analysis.
“So much professional and leadership development occurs through informal, on-the-job, challenging experiences; however, much remains to be learned about how to unlock the tremendous developmental potential that challenging experiences have for people, or about how to predict who will be effective in getting the most from challenging experiences,” Maurer said.
He says that that this research has multiple goals. One goal is, when it comes to people having these challenging experiences, the research can help leaders to better understand how to predict and intervene so as to enhance the positive or constructive outcomes that may result from these experiences. Another goal is to develop new measures of individual differences and training tools that can be used to enhance leadership development.
In light of the Army project, Maurer has stepped down from his role as chair of the Department of Managerial Sciences and professor Pamela Barr has stepped in as interim chair.
Maurer joined Robinson in 2003 and was named department chair in 2005. He is a past recipient of the Outstanding Human Resource Development Scholar Award from the Academy of Human Resource Development, was elected to Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the American Psychological Association, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Akron.
Barr joined Robinson in 1997. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests center on the role of managerial and organizational cognition in strategy formulation and change. In addition to having her research appear in multiple publications, she is also co-author of the book "A Cognitively Anchored Theory of Strategic Change," which was a 2001 George R. Terry Book Award Finalist.
Sept. 28, 2011